A Short Intro to a Really Long Story
It didn't start out that way. If I had known that it would take me three years just to cover the first semester of Perry's 8th grade adventures, I think I would have abandoned the project without ever posting it. Like a lot of creative efforts, Perry and Jesse grew...and grew and grew and grew. I was originally inspired by Comicality's New Kid In School series, which in itself is pretty long. I don't honestly know if Comicality had a specific ending in mind for NKIS when he started out, but I certainly did for P & J. That's why I felt comfortable with the prologue to Part I, figuring that all would be explained somewhere along the way.
Being a completely fictional account of a completely fictional set of characters, I wanted to write about contemporary kids wearing contemporary clothing and using contemporary language and technology, so I set the prologue in the future. I also wanted to establish the frame: Perry, who seems to fall head over heels in love with Jesse early on in the series, apparently has a change of heart at some point in the unspecified future and ends up married with kids—a poignant situation to say the least. I had a pretty good idea when the break up would occur (the end of high school), and how the lives of my two protagonists would go from there. It seemed like there was enough material there for a long, but not endless, story.
There were other things I wanted to do with P & J other than simply paying homage to Comicality's classic teenage soap opera; I wanted to incorporate my interest in fetishes along with the traditional romantic-style sex that usually occurs in this subgenre of erotic gay fiction. Thus we discover early on that Perry has a thing for feet, and a little later, we also discover that Jesse has an interest in bondage (although to complicate matters, Jesse's fetish is not dominance driven). The other sexual element I incorporated involves Perry as a befuddled, somewhat naive, universally attractive young teen who comes to the somewhat uneasy realization that he might be bisexual. This conceit allowed me to introduce a series of secondary characters who were almost all enamored of Perry in one way or another. Many erotic and sexually charged confrontations ensued. I enjoy writing this stuff.
And thus, the story became long—really long. And I started to wonder if I had bitten off more than I could chew. In fact, I am still wondering that even as I press ahead with Part VI of this erotic tale. There is some good news and some bad news in all of this. The good news is two fold: first, that I am pressing on with the writing, despite having less time in my life for this secret hobby of mine; and secondly, that I am still working within the original framework. Even though the series spins itself out as an almost daily diary of Perry and Jesse's unlikely romance, and even though I believe that it compares more favorably to a long running television series (such as the X-Files, that had many stand alone episodes, in addition to its infamous alien conspiracy thread that ran the length of the series) than to an online novel, in truth, it has elements of both. It is only when we finally get to the intended ending—Why did Perry and Jesse, two boys passionately, desperately in love, break up and go their separate ways?—that we will be able to see the structure as something more than a series of teenage adventures. When will we get to this oft mentioned ending? To this question, I have no firm answer. For the moment, the task of writing Part VI is in itself a seeming insurmountable task. I have it mostly worked out in my head, but the actual writing...ugh.
While it isn't my place as the author to tell the reader how to read P&J, I will make a few comments and suggestions. Don't be discouraged from reading the current series because you are upset that Perry and Jesse will part ways at some point. That is a long way down the road yet, and even then, it's not the end of the story (yikes!). Don't look for any subtext or political message. It's just a story. Sure, some of my own personal beliefs and experiences will come through now and again, but they will only be used for the purpose of breathing life into the characters I have created for your (and my) entertainment. Finally, I think P&J is best enjoyed as a serial, something to be followed on an installment by installment basis: a teenage soap opera. There will be some adventure, some sex, some humor, some drama, and a wacky adventure or two. Nothing deep. Nothing to lose sleep over.
Newly Edited Version—What's The Point?
I'm a tweaker. I don't think I fully realized that until I started posting P&J. I will play with a sentence, a paragraph, a conversation, a plot point, or even a dream sequence until it's just...what? That's hard to describe. I don't (necessarily) know what is right, but I do have a sense when something isn't working or when something can be improved. Even after I've worked a chapter over a hundred times over a period of three months, it's still not really finished. In fact, none of my writing ever feels like the finished product; it's just what comes out when it seems that I have run up against my deadline, self-imposed or not.
After Finishing Part V, I felt like I needed a break. I still had plenty of ideas, but not the motivation and self discipline to write it all out. Also, I had written a lot of stuff. And when I looked back on how much material I had written for the series, I also realized that I had forgotten a lot as well. It occurred to me that it might be a good idea for me to reread the whole series from the beginning; but of course, once I started reading, I wanted to make changes.
Some changes needed to be made in order to eliminate blatant plot and character discontinuity. Other changes I wanted to make had more to do with the style I have developed as I have written P&J. Even though it has remained consistently in first person (highly) subjective, it has changed a little over the past three years. Additionally, there are always grammatical and linguistic errors that need to be corrected. That is why, in addition to making a complete pass of each chapter myself, I am still passing the work along to an editor/proofreader for that final polish.
So the point of posting this slightly re-edited version of P&J is not to alter the story in any way, but to refresh my own memory of characters and events as I proceed through Part VI, and also to give the work an extra tweak, one that I hope makes for smoother and more enjoyable reading. Some of you might enjoy rereading the series yourself as the newly edited chapters are posted here exclusively at this site.
I hope you will find this website, dedicated to Perry and Jesse, a place where you can leave comments, open up discussions, share pictures and artwork, and make friends. Also, if you haven't explored the gayauthors website, I hope you will use P&J as a jumping off point. I am honored to be in such illustrious company. I'll keep the livejournal account as a place to repost important updates (since many of the chapters still posted at Nifty direct readers to it); but from now on, I would appreciate you leaving your comments regarding P&J at the underthehoodster forum at gayauthors.org.
I hope this site becomes a fun and warm community. I know one thing from the thousands of readers I have heard from, people who read P&J are romantics at heart, and whether that's a good or bad thing, they have a home here.
underthehoodster January, 2006
